Have You Ever Tried DMT Bro?

Hey,

This week Eli is providing the topic relating to Terence McKenna, psychedelics, and philosophy. Here's the write-up:

Was Terence McKenna just a weird little man who wanted you to smoke DMT and meet the machine elves while looking and sounding like one himself? Or was he the Bard of Consciousness, a philosopher who offered us a way to hack the operating system of reality, bypassing both the mundane boredom of modern life and the dogmatic limits of polite society?

In his life, he gave us "Stoned Ape Theory," the idea that early man ate psychedelic mushrooms which sped up our evolution, and Timewave Zero Theory, the idea that novelty—that is to say, events that are counterposed against phenomena brought about by habit, can be accurately extrapolated from a mathematical function. Furthermore, Timewave Zero Theory suggested that a period of great change would occur on December 21st, 2012 (like the Mayans??). However, that date has come and gone. So what does that mean for us? What is really going on? What is the deal with Terence McKenna? Let’s figure this out together.
Dogma vs. the Lived Experience. For Terence McKenna, dogma does not simply mean the formal teachings of schools of thought or religious authorities, though it certainly includes them. Rather, he describes dogma as a consensus hallucination, a structure of meaning sustained through social reinforcement rather than any necessary correspondence to reality. This was the deepest offense for McKenna: that dogma uses language and authority to insert itself between the individual and experience, converting direct encounters with the real into secondhand events. When a pattern of thought repeats long enough, it hardens into “how things are,” disguising contingency as inevitability. This is why McKenna viewed society not as a protector of meaning, but as a limiting force:
“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.”

Ultimately, for McKenna, the struggle against dogma was a struggle to reclaim one’s own mind. To accept a dogmatic world is to exchange the raw immediacy for a sterile simulation.

Dogma is born of habit and pattern—and it walks the beaten path. In opposition to dogma, McKenna defines novelty, which at its core is anything that breaks pattern. Novelty introduces complexity and chaos. For a thing to be truly novel, a system must be unable to accept it without a fundamental alteration, such that the system is no longer recognizable. In other words, novelty for McKenna must be transformative, not simply additive. Novelty is not inherently kind, progressive, or comforting. Psychedelics mattered to McKenna because they reintroduce novelty at the level of perception itself.

“I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about.”

Of course, no write-up on McKenna would be complete without talking about the self-transforming machine elves. He acknowledged they could be the sole result of ingesting a substance, though he hated calling DMT a "drug", but he preferred to play with the mystery. He basically thought they were funny little guys that show up when you smoke enough DMT, and it amused him to think of them as inter-dimensional entities. But they weren't just a joke to him; they were proof that there are things in this universe that refuse to fit into our little boxes.

Because of how he viewed the dichotomy between habit and novelty, almost in a Heraclitean manner, McKenna famously predicted that the world was going to get “weirder and stranger” as these forces continue to struggle. He didn't think history was stabilizing; he thought it was accelerating into complexity. Whether you buy the whole theory or not, McKenna leaves us with a real challenge: the future might not belong to the people who cling to the familiar, but to the ones willing to face the strange without trying to explain it away.